Since New Years or so, when visiting from my iPad, occasionally the phone version shows up, which is annoying because there is plenty of room on the iPad for the regular site. Would prefer to ony ever see regular site on iPad.

Other than that, I got nothin. Keep up the good work. I guess there is one other thing…

I realize that the GOP is worse, but I am getting very leery of all the encroachments on the 4,5,and 6 amendments by Obama. It needs attention. I am not happy at all about the banks shutting down OWS via police I pay for, coordinated by FBI. But will not pollute a thread with that concern.

On a more serious note, I’d like to see the main text column be variable width again, so it uses all available space between the sidebars. And bring back the rotating tags at the top, which seem to have disappeared.

@burnspbesq: This may sound silly, but THANK YOU for your comment – the site has been repeatedly (though not consistently) loading on my iPad in the mobile format lately, and it was driving me nuts. I had never bothered to scroll all the way down when this happened, so I had no idea there was a switch.Yaaay!

Gaming the system by having 8 top 25 teams to start every season guarantees that the SEC always will have a team in the BCS Championship. They beat each other and then everyone says they played the toughest schedule. But they never play a single game in weather below 50 degrees, and rarely outside the south. While everyone else has to battle their schedule and the elements. Everyone outside SEC country who knows anything about college football knows this.

Animated stuff makes me anxious — turns on a neurological over-stimulation problem. I use Flash Blocker and AdBlocker to keep from having to deal with animations now. Any other animations I can’t control will drive me away from the site.

You do realize that you’re saying that a conference that has won the last 6 national championships, with 3 different teams, is overrated…right?

Yeah, but just wait until Rutgers and Maryland join the Big 10. Then we’ll see who wins. Or t least who gets the most money that goes God knows where to fund God knows what, most likely child soldier divisions somewhere.

Gaming the system by having 8 top 25 teams to start every season guarantees that the SEC always will have a team in the BCS Championship.

First, they don’t vote themselves into the top 25. Secondly, they still have to win all the games on their schedule.

But they never play a single game in weather below 50 degrees, and rarely outside the south.

Well that’s a function of their geographic location, so I don’t see what point that is. Also, it has nothing to do with he fact that they’ve beaten teams on neutral fields in the championship games.

For the past 5 years (not including the SEC/SEC game), they have beaten the team that played them in the national championship game. That is the measure of the best team. What you’re saying is that because they don’t play in snow, they’re not any good? Sounds like a lot of hate coming from you.

Also sounds like a midwesterner mourning the good ole days when the Big 10 was actually relavent.

Everyone outside SEC country who knows anything about college football knows this.

Right…everyone thinks that. I think that everyone in your social circle believes that…doesn’t make it true.

You want there to be other determining factors to decide the champion, instead of winning in a championship game. That’s not going to happen. Whether or not a team plays in snow, will never be a determining factor for how good a team is…because they don’t play championship games in the snow.

Here’s a bit on common knowledge you may not be aware of…the only people that talk about “the elements” are the people that have to deal with them. There’s a reason that most of the top athletes go to schools in warmer climates…nobody likes playing in “the elements”.

I was having a different (and even more annoying) problem with the mobile site on my iPhone — it would randomly turn on and off, and there didn’t seem to be any way to force it to stay “on.”

A couple of people recommended that I clear my cookies and history, but it didn’t seem to help. After clicking on a couple of posts, it would switch off again and I would have to clear history and cookies all over again.

So I also vote for having a m.balloon-juice.com URL rather than the buggy on/off switch.

@Mnemosyne: I was having the same problem. I don’t know if it was a coincidence, but after clearing history and cookies, I didn’t go back into any threads that had shown the desktop style instead of mobile style. I was shown the desktop home page a few more times when I returned, but then the home page and all new threads flipped to mobile. And ever since, I get pure mobile.

Still buggy, though. I’d also vote for a separate URL for the mobile site.

I’d be all about requiring logging on to post comments, wherein the commenter-to-be would be presented at the beginning of each session with a short list of questions designed to determine their familiarity with scientific method. Fail = remaining on the sidelines, barking.

Actually, my first idea was a commenting log-on process that would operate as a mental breathalyzer to screen out drunk posts, but the I realized this place would be a ghost town after 5:00.

The idea of a ‘Preview’ button has been discussed in the past, and rejected, IIRC because it creates too many problems with the site. But if those problems could be resolved, it would be worth considering again. And if the Preview button was operated by magic pastel robots, that would be especially awesome.

Mouse-over of any instance of the acronym FYWP triggers a sad trombone sound

Oh my god THIS please!

Also can you put in a robot commenter that automatically responds to anyone complaining about the ads google shows them to say that those ads reflect their own damn browsing history and are not a conspiracy by the bloggers to assault their eyes with unwanted crap. I think the bot-comment should be intensely profane and include lots of words that set off FYWP so that all replies get moderated and don’t show.

I would like to vote in favor of the current large-text-field on the left format. It works better with the cheap laptops I usually use, where scrolling right-to-left is a real pain in the neck.

Navigation buttons at the foot of the comments would also be nice. Barring that, please keep the little arrow-thingy that, with a single click, takes you back to the top of the post, so one can navigate from there.

As for the blogroll: why not trash it? There is something awfully 2004 about a blogroll, and half the links are dead in any case.

I know I’m old but I use the blogroll to visit sites every day. Sure I could create bookmarks for each of the sites I want to visit but I drop by BJ so often & it easier to just click over there.

Plus it introduced me to John Scalzi after I had given up on SF novels and Ta-Nehisi Coates when the Atlantic was overloaded with some of the worst ‘thinkers’ available. That last one alone is reason enough for it to be around in perpetuity.

Absolutely hated it when the NYTimes changed its commenting software and removed numbered comments. Now the readers comments are just a mass, rather than discrete responses. A real problem when there are 400+ comments.

RE blogroll: maybe update and keep it, but behind a link that those interested can click on?

I would also love to be able to sort by commenter — for example, to be able to search for all “Kay” posts so that I can find the particular one on voting rights I’m searching.

Could you add a tag for posts by Kay, posts by mistermix, etc.?

Wouldn’t mind seeing a tag for Lily pictures, Rosie pictures, Tunch photos … because they’re not up there frequently enough!

I like the current layout, but like others have said, I come for the content. My only suggestion would be the addition of the last post/next post links at the bottom above the “Leave a Reply” area, so you can navigate top and bottom.

The Big Ten was never that relevant, Michigan and Ohio State were, with occasionally great teams from other schools– like most conferences. The issues that both of those schools have had over the last 5 years are well known, but OSU also just went undefeated and a basically talent-free Michigan was barely beaten by a top ten SEC team.

The issue people have with the insane conference worship that SEC fans (and only SEC fans, as nobody else roots for their conference like that) engage in is not that Alabama or LSU or anyone else who has won a championship isn’t a great team, it’s the notion that the midlevel schools are also incredibly powerful juggernauts just because SEC.